Chapter Text
Prologue
I have stood knee-deep in mud and bone and filled my lungs with mustard gas. I have seen two brothers fall. I have lain with holy wars and copulated with the autumnal fallout. I have dug trenches for the refugees. I have murdered dissidents where the ground never thaws and starved the masses into faith. A child's shadow burnt into the brickwork. A house of skulls in the jungle. The innocent. The innocent, Mandus, trod and bled and gassed and starved and beaten and murdered and enslaved! This is your coming century! They will eat them, Mandus. They will make pigs of you all, and they will bury their snouts into your ribs, and they will eat – your – hearts!
The Engineer, 31 December 1899
It is said that dying men tell no lies. The great Machine is not a man, and so it is not precisely dying as the power flowing through its metal veins shudders ever closer to a standstill. Yet the sentience within the Machine is human, and it fears that when the power fails, death will indeed be its fate.
He is frightened, this invisible Engineer, this deranged fragment of a soul who gives voice to cold metal and boiling steam. He has walked with fear many times, but not until now has he feared his own creator, the light to his darkness.
He has said everything he can, summoned all his roiling dread and hate and spoken with terrible eloquence of the horrors to come. Now he has no more words, and this frightens him more than anything. Until now, he has always had back doors should something go amiss, but no such options remain to him. He has bared his clockwork heart and begged for his life in the only way he can. If his plea goes unheeded, his maker will shut down the Machine forever and condemn the world to the trampling of blade, bullet, and gas.
And so, the Engineer tells no more lies. He speaks only truth now in the hope of wrenching himself and the world back from oblivion.
From his seat atop an Aztec temple miles underground, Oswald Mandus senses this, and he believes his creation's savage, poignant words. The wars, the weapons, and the death that lie ahead are all as terrible as the Engineer has always sung to him.
The power to prevent it all rests at Mandus's fingertips. The Machine is so steeped in blood now that it can crack the world egg, wipe out humanity, and begin the world anew. Mandus holds the apocalypse, the keys to end suffering - he can pull a lever and become a god, like the Mexican deities who destroyed and remade the world five times over. That was how he saw his great Machine from the beginning: another Huitzilopochtli. At least, that was how the Machine saw itself. Mandus is not sure which thoughts are his anymore.
And yet, in spite of all this, he remains quite calm. He knows there is but one way to repay the hundreds of people he sacrificed to the Machine. The only true payment for life is life, so he must render the twentieth century unto mankind, wars and all, and spare the human race the great cleansing holocaust the Machine has in mind. Alive, they have a chance at redemption. Dead, the chance dies with them.
Mandus knows that to shut down his creation forever, he must extract the other half of his soul from the Machine. He also knows that to do so, he must die, for only in death can his two disparate parts merge into one. He will be the final blood sacrifice, here atop this temple in the earth.
He does not fear. He is damned for a filicide, the blood of hundreds is raining through his factory, his soul is vitiated beyond hope of repair: he has no reason to cling to life save to do this last thing. Imperfect though they are, human beings deserve the chance. Perhaps they may yet prove the Engineer wrong.
Numb to all but resolve, Mandus pulls the lever in front of him, and four mechanical arms snake towards him, wicked pincers glinting in the darkness. Alphabet blocks lie scattered at his feet, emblems of the children he spared from the Somme - but he did not give their hearts to the Machine here in this subterranean temple. This place belongs to Mandus alone, he who will be both high priest and sacrifice.
“I…am begging you,” comes the Engineer’s refined, resonant voice from within the metal. It holds no malice now, no pomposity, only a deep, genuine fear – and sorrow. For what? For the Machine’s unrealized purpose? For the failure of its twisted redemption? “You made me. You are my creator, my father! You cannot destroy me!”
“Don’t beg, creature,” says Mandus, closing his eyes. “It does not suit you.”
Quite aware that he has chosen the fate of all mankind, has rejected the chance to sit forever with the ancient deities of the Mexica, Mandus smiles. The four mechanical arms plunge into his heart and his creation gives a last cry of despair. The sound falls into the cold darkness. Then, where just seconds ago there was a titanic clash of souls, there is suddenly nothing at all.
A church bell rings, miles above, and the new century is born.